Traditionally, spirituality was part of religious practice and the attempt to inhabit the original shape of things or live in the image of God.

In early Christianity, spirituality is related to living a life orientated by the Holy Spirit. This is later complicated with aesthetic practises like self-flagellation that missed the point.

In modern times, spirituality refers to many experiences and practices. Spirituality tends now to be about the individual on their personal quest for meaning.

Today, spirituality doesn't automatically include a religious or communal dimension.

Spirituality generally is about an encounter, whether it is a communal, spiritual, religious or individual experience.

The challenge of spirituality

The challenge with spirituality is to integrate various elements. For Christians, it is the pursuit of an interior life of meaning that is "hidden with God in Christ".

A healthy "daily" spirituality seeks the middle way between the temptation to do nothing on the one hand and to become a religious nutcase on the other.

Healthy daily spirituality is the spirituality of the ordinary, of daily living.

It is the spirituality, for example, of the working person, the grandparent, the beneficiary, the retired and the school pupil.

The person who lives in the real world and strives to hold competing demands in balance needs a spirituality that gives balance and meaning to life.

As we develop an interior spiritual life, we experience tensions and look for a spirit-frame of living to make the spiritual life happen.

The Tensions

The holy place and the ordinary place

Is God most easily found in the church, shrine, monastery, or at home in the kitchen, with the family, in a marriage or even on the sports ground?

Is the tension resolved when we remember that God is both transcendent and the immanent, incarnate God?

Sexuality, sexual passion and religious purity or celibacy

Is God part of your sexuality and sex life or opposed to it? Is your soul fulfilled by eros or awe, and can you have both, or are these mutually exclusive?

If you sublimate your sexuality and its desires, will you be holier or an unhealthy example of a human being?

Community and personal fulfilment

Is the higher call to serve God and others in the community using one's talents or to serve one's freedom?

The Covid experience has brought this question into stark relief. Should individual personal freedom be sacrificed for the common good?

How do we deal positively with the ache for personal love and achievement when acting on this is inappropriate?

This life and the next

Am I living for this life or for the next, and what perspective does this give me? Does the life Jesus promises begin now for me or does it begin at my death?

Is this life a "veil of tears" or the way God leads me to life?

Intellect and will

What rules my life, my heart or my head? Am I ruled by one more than the other and more a prey to one than the other?

Do my thoughts or my feelings reveal God's presence to me?

Personal conscience and Church moral teaching

When there's a conflict between how I need to live my life—to be authentic—how do I 'shape the conversation'? What parameters do I use?

Is a conflict an opportunity for a deeper adult conversation with God and a chance to perhaps better integrate my life as a Christian?

Daily spirituality

Daily spirituality is ‘ordinary life,' blessed by God.

This spirituality gives time to God, the family, the church, society, the soul and the world.

It is aware of colleagues and friends.

It is practical, straightforward, generous, and sensible.

When a person spends all day in front of the tabernacle and forgets to nurture their relationships, feed the hungry, clothe the naked or visit the prisoner, there is a significant problem.

A daily spirituality is not distracted by devotions when there are children to be fed, and marriages don't go bust because too little time has been given to the spouse.

Those that disagree might think they are better fitted for a monastery, but the monastery won't want them because there, too, the rule is Ora et Labora (prayer and work).

Daily spiritual life is not an abdication from living.

Daily spirituality takes time for contemplation, action, socialising and rest. It is a lifetime of gentle fidelity to God and neighbour and a healthy awareness of self.

It is easy for good people to get hooked into religion, private prayer and social service and social justice and forget that they have family members to serve. This is a crucial message of the scriptures. (Luke 1:39-45.)

Life and spirituality are not binary; they aren't intrinsically oppositional.

Ancient wisdom suggests that a healthy spiritual life and living a healthy human life is the key to happiness.

• Joe Grayland is a theologian and a priest of the Diocese of Palmerston North. His latest book is: Liturgical Lockdown. Covid and the Absence of the Laity (Te Hepara Pai, 2020).

Mike Tyson claimed he "died" during his first trip and said using the drug has provided him with an entirely different perspective on life. Read more

Father Stephen Truscott SM PhD said the Enneagram is among the field of psychology that talks about personality profiles.

In his role as Fullness of Life Counsellor and Spiritual Director, Fr Truscott uses his training in the Enneagram to assist him to appreciate how better to accompany a person on their spiritual journey.

The Enneagram was part of Fr Truscott's formation as a spiritual director at the Institute for Spirituality Leadership in Chicago and he uses it in his 'dual practice - in person and digital' service at the Fullness of Life Centre.

To break it down, Fr Truscott explained to The eRecord how the psychological method is utilised to understand personality according to nine different typologies.

Those typologies are:

• Reformer (1)
• Helper (2)
• Achiever (3)
• Individualist (4)
• Investigator (5)
• Loyalist (6)
• Enthusiast (7)
• Challenger (8)
• Peacemaker (9).

"Each looks at different ways to understand some basic personality traits of a human being. Often, people find one typology holds their experience better than another," Fr Truscott said.

Three basic groupings are: helper-achiever-individualist (2-3-4), investigator-loyalist-enthusiast (5-6-7) and challenger-peacemaker-reformer (8-9-1).

"If we consider the post-Resurrection narratives in St John's Gospel; three stories describe how Jesus related to Mary Magdalene (a 234 personality), Peter (a 891 personality) and Thomas (a 567 personality)."

Fr Truscott said the Enneagram offers an insight into how Jesus called each disciple to deeper conversion in their lives.

234 personality

As an example of this type of personaliy, Fr Truscott says Mary of Magdala, was an anxious, energetic person.

Developing Mary's 234 personality Fr Truscott observes, she organised a group of her friends to get up very early the day after the Sabbath and go to Jesus' tomb to finish the burial rituals.

In her anxious insecurity, when she got there, she was so caught up in planning, she overlooked what was happening in the present moment and mistook Jesus for the gardener.

It was only when Jesus called her by name and said, ‘Mary!' did she come back to herself in the present moment. She realised that it was Jesus standing there before her.

Then, in her anxiety to reconnect with Jesus, she raced to touch him.

Jesus told her, ‘Don't touch me.'

In saying this, Jesus was not afraid of being touched, he was comfortable with physical affection. By saying, ‘Don't touch me.'

Jesus invited Mary to move from finding false security through getting her energy from people outside of herself to moving to a place within herself in which she could find a true interior source of security.

When she became re-centred within herself, Jesus then invited her to move back into action but from a centred place of security inside her; he told her to go and to tell the disciples in Jerusalem that he had risen.

891 personality

Peter the apostle was a very different person says Fr Truscott.

Fr Truscott calls him "a feisty character who often expressed strong emotions".

By way of example, Fr Truscotts says that before Jesus' death, Peter held his ground.

He declared that he would not reject Jesus.

For Peter, there was no way he would lose control, yet soon after, when put in a vulnerable situation and out of fear for his own self-preservation, Peter denied Jesus not once, but three times.

When Jesus meet Peter after the resurrection, he had to ask Peter three times did he love him before Peter dropped his protective mask of self-preservation.

Peter then acknowledged from within the raw pain of his vulnerability that, even though he had denied Jesus three times, he loved Jesus.

In this, Peter moved from a place of regret about the past to a place of no regret.

567 personality

Thomas, a 567 personality, was much quieter, Fr Truscott observed.

A more introverted person by nature, after Jesus' resurrection, even though he had heard Jesus had risen from the dead, Thomas, out of fear, he took refuge in the safety of distancing himself from what had occurred.

Thomas needed to make sense of things before he felt safe to take part which took him time.

When Thomas met Jesus, in the safe company of the other disciples, Jesus invited Thomas to touch his wounds, said Fr Truscott.

In this, Jesus invited Thomas to move out of the safety of his observations and perceptions about life and to take part in the emotional intimacy of life itself.

In reaching out and bridging the great divide between his thoughts and his ability to move into effective concrete action, Thomas shifted from dealing with life abstractly to engaging life in a concrete enfleshed way.

Enneagram as help to a full life

Fr Truscott says the Enneagram helps him better appreciate people.

"If I'm journeying with someone in the 891 space, I'm very aware their primary life question is: ‘Who am I?'.

"The 234's life question is: ‘How am I doing?'

"While for people in the 567 space, their life question is more about ‘Where am I?', looking to make sense of their life," he added.

"If I meet someone in a critical circumstance from the 891 space, they'll often describe their difficulty in terms of: ‘I don't know who I am any more'; 234 people will talk about themselves as: ‘I don't know what to do'; and 567 people often will say: ‘I can't make sense of my life any more'.

Different perspectives

Fr Truscott acknowledged that there are different views on how people perceive the Enneagram.

"Some treat it with suspicion", he said.

"Some say the Enneagram may not have biblical foundations to it. But we can see that when we study the history of the Christian tradition, part of our theological process is to adapt contemporary paradigms to talk about our faith.

"For instance, if we live in a post-modern secular world, how do we find a language that speaks into people's contemporary life in a way that's relevant to them?"

He is adamant that the Enneagram is one way among many ways of trying to speak into people's experience.

"People can find [the Enneagram] helpful to understand where the growth-points are in their own personal and spiritual journey.

Fullness of Life Centre

Fr Truscott and Celia Joyce MPS are the Spiritual Directors and Counsellors at the Fullness of Life Centre www.fullnessoflife.org.

They offer a dual practice - in person and digital service, meeting with anyone interested in their spiritual journey at the Fullness of Life Centre or online by secure video conference.

Sources

• Matthew Lau/The eRecord
• Photo of Stephen Truscott, by Matthew Lau

Many respected persons made it a practice to rise in the night or in the quiet hours of the morning to seek inspiration that comes in silence, Plato, Einstein, and even Jesus Himself. We all should find a time and a place to be in silent prayer. In the Carmelite tradition, the spiritual life is said to have two aims: the first is about our love of God and the second is about God's love for us. The practice of silence facilitates both of these aims.

The experience of God's love for us

We are meant to taste in our hearts and experience in our minds, not only after death but in this life, something of the power of the Divine Presence and the bliss of heavenly glory. From this point of departure in faith, silence becomes more than a practice. It is a form of prayer - a prayer of listening, waiting, and receptivity. It is a prayer that anticipates and expects intimate communion; it believes in the possibility and holds in high esteem the value of being in relationship with God.

The value of this type of prayer is difficult for our productivity-oriented culture to grasp. It is hard for us to see that a prayer in which "being" predominates over "doing" and that a prayer in which nothing happens is a prayer in which everything happens. It is in silence that we make the interior transition from darkness to light. We become more aware of God's presence within us, of Him speaking to us, of the hidden things which He wishes to reveal to us. Continue reading

• Source: Sister Mary Clare, O.C.D. in Integrated Catholic Life
• Image: The Raw Story

Par for the course now but this was Paris during the Second World War. A world in turmoil meant people were thinking for themselves, taking up with new liberation movements and deciding not to come to church.

Like any church facing hard times, good ideas were fallen upon with enthusiasm. So when news of a priest grafting alongside the dockworkers in Marseilles hit town, the worker-priest model got legs fast.

Broadly speaking, the idea was that priests and monks were to take the good news of Christ with them as they moved out of religious houses to live and work with the ordinary folk of France.

The inevitable happened. Priests fell in love, got married, joined trade unions, the communist party and all manner of trouble-making groups. In short, the communities they had become part of transformed them.

What's more, the official good news seemed superfluous. The light already existed in the people they thought they'd come to help. As though Christ had sneaked in with no permission from the church and strangely enough, didn't realise Christianity owned him.

This is exactly my experience as a hospital chaplain. God, the Divine, the Light, the Christos, however you language this underpinning of human existence, this presence, it exists in the most basic of human interactions.

Spiritual presence that becomes apparent in offerings like cleaning up folk who can't control their bowels, in wiping blood off the floor, in carting equipment, in attending to birthing and dying, and sometimes even in arguments about budgets. It lives without fanfare, often without words and definitely without adherence to any particular faith tradition.

Get too close to those everyday actions in an effort to describe their interconnectedness and you will be blinded by their ordinary functionality, and appear ridiculous in your quest for understanding. Spirituality is a shy beast, tentative but passionate.

Being near, like the worker-priests were, offering space and acceptance, pointing to the ancient spiritual traditions without expecting belief or commitment is enough, but not always for the authorities. By the 1950's worker-priests were considered to be out of control and the project was stopped.

There's always tension around spirituality and organizations because Spirit is about liminality, walking the thin places where the Divine is sensed and known. Ways of being that are at odds with institutional creeds and mission statements.

Church or health organizations can offer an environment that encourages this fragile mysticism in motion, or exert controls that push it under.

To suppress it maintains the fiction that being religious has to be about belief instead of awakening to what lies deep within.

Source